Wanted: Comments on Kansas Standards

Opportunity to comment on the Science Curriculum Standards Draft and the Intelligent Design/creationist Proposals (Minority Report) on the Kansas Department of Education’s (KSDE) website.

From Kansas Citizens for Science:

One part of the Kansas state Board of Education’s recent Resolution concerning the science standards was to “collect comments from the public regarding the various proposed changes to the Science Curriculum Standards, either contained within the Science Curriculum Standards Draft or contained within the Minority Report.” KSDE has set up a webpage where one can offer comments on either or both of these.

Furthermore, the Resolution instructed KSDE to “make the raw data available to the members of the Board, and to deliver to the KSBE a report that will organize the data into categories of (a) how many respondents were within Kansas; (b) the number of respondents that generally supported and generally opposed the various areas of input.”

We urge you to go to here and comment. We understand that science is not established by public vote, and that this survey is merely a vehicle for trying to legitimize inserting Intelligent Design creationism-influenced claims into the standards. However, as long as the survey is there, we need to respond.

We recommend that you make short, firm statements - most of what they will be doing is counting responses. Include both a comment for the Science Curriculum Standards Draft and one against the Intelligent Design/creationist Proposals (Minority Report). Be sure to include your credentials, such as scientist, science educator, parent, businessperson, and so on. Note also that even though they will separating in-state from out-of-state responses, out-of-state responses are important because they show that the nation has its eyes on Kansas.

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9 Comments

Comment regarding KS science standards draft: The science standards look strong. I was impressed to see that the life science standard for grade twelve included an evolution benchmark. As a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology who has taught an introductory course on human evolution, I appreciate high school biology teachers’ going above-and-beyond what some of their colleagues may be doing by giving time to evolution in their classrooms. We need good science teachers passing on good information and inspiring students! I would not be where I am today without being fortunate enough to have had outstanding teachers.

Comment regarding the Minority report:

It’s 2005, almost 150 years after Darwin published “On the Origin of Species,” and yet over half of U.S. citizens stated in a recent poll that they think God created humans in their present form. This is an alarming epidemic of denial of scientific evidence, and it underscores the need for better teaching of science in our schools. There should be no controversy concerning the inclusion of evolution and the exclusion of intelligent design in science curricula. “Believing” in the theory of evolution is on equal footing with “believing” in the theory of relativity. Those who criticize evolution by saying that it’s “just a theory, not a fact” should review a basic scientific glossary and learn that in science, a theory is a hypothesis that has been supported by a large body of evidence - it’s stood the test of time. Science is centered around testing hypotheses.

The theory of evolution says nothing about the origins of life. Accepting evolution and accepting God/Allah/etc. as the creator of life are not mutually-exclusive.

Evolution makes a set of claims regarding how the first cell came into existance that it has no support for. The fact that they can’t agree which planet the first cell started on is a clue that they are fudging.

There is close to a complete lack of support for the set of genetic stair climbing that evolution supports. Yes there is a tree of life with apparently increasing complexity. But your massive massive inability to predict successfuly belies the state of your largely unproven scientific theory that you commonly call fact.

That Darwin Cult needs to review what science is. Science is built upon predicting knowledge that you do not currently know with precision without changing your theory to match new data. Evolution does not predict with precision, it has not been able to predict how amino acids form into cells. It has not been able to show how DNA and RNA came into existance or how they managed to increase their length and complexity.

If you are honest you have to call evoultion a belief. Its the belief that some MAGIC happened to amino acids to form RNA or DNA (you can’t decide), this RNA/DNA chain then MAGICALLY increased in complexity until complex cells were formed and then those cells MAGICALLY decided to cooperate and form organisms. These organisms then MAGICALLY increased in complexity until we were evolved.

All this to prove that a MAGIC God doesn’t exist.

LOL history will laugh at you like you laugh at the medieval sophists.

The comment of Jennifer Weghorst appears to be unclear within her own understanding of what a hypothesis is. The definition of a hypothesis is an educated guess which is not the same as a fact. The experimentation process of providing support for a scientific theory is just the systemic approach to trying to prove whether there is enough evidence to have an tested hypothesis become a fact.